The Causes of Wars

March 27, 2017

On March 27th, historian Margaret MacMillan delivered a seminar titled “The Causes of War” at the Johns Hopkins SAIS Europe campus in Bologna, Italy. She discussed the fascination with the causes of war, analyzing both the long-term and short-term factors that contributed to the outbreak of WWI. MacMillan is skeptical about the impact of democratization around the world on the elimination of war. While she would like to believe that modern-day international institutions are strong enough to withstand war, she puts forward that all species, including humans, feel a certain, perhaps irrational, responsibility to defend their territory. War has not become an impossibility, she said.